Geisha girls and dragons, the co-existence of ancient superstition and modern technology, allegiance to a god-emperor, the traditions of a warrior caste, Japanese art, history, landscape, architecture and religion - all these find their appropriate place in Meeting with Japan. Fosco Maraini might have been content to draw a brilliant portrait of the surface features of an exotic civilization; he is much more concerned with penetrating to the heart within, employing all his great gifts of exposition and sympathy to do so. Perhaps no other people in the world are more remote to us, more difficult to understand, than the Japanese; but Maraini goes far towards bridging that gap, and reveals them as human and intelligible, so that he is able to write of their country as if it were Greece or Italy. At one level Meeting with Japan is pre-eminently a travel book of the kind that is almost a substitute for foreign travel; at another, it is a major intellectual exercise in crossing the frontiers of one's own civilization and penetrating to the essence of the other.